the things to do.

On Distraction, Grief, and the meaning of Sustenance

It’s -2 degrees, and there are fawns. So we put out apples.

Think about this:

The ten Substacks that compel you to shut the computer and read a book. The pencil sketch drawn in the morning while sitting at your desk, before your partner gets up. The three lines of poetry that spilled out of you like water. The tulips you’ve planted for next spring. The O’Keefe that you can’t turn away from. The eight minutes of meditation you do every morning while listening to Philip Glass. The slimy orange ball that you throw to the dog in the yard while your tea steeps. The hour that disappears while you play the piano. The knitting, the cooking, the singing quietly while chopping a carrot, the dancing in the kitchen. The walking without a phone and nothing in your pocket but a small notebook and a chewed-down pencil. The Mel Brooks higher power joke about a huge guy named Phil, and the rest of his friends sitting around the cave when someone gets hit by a bolt of lightning, and they all look up and say There’s something bigger than Phil.

(I’ll say it so you don’t have to: saccharine. I think we consider mundanity saccharine precisely because it tends not to be exceptional.)

The world is full of suggestions and advice for coping with this current state of affairs, and how it is gnawing its way into our lives, our time, and our equanimity (assuming we had some to begin with).

We are busy people, and something has to give. It’s an old thing for me, and how I have always been effected by circumstances beyond my control:

I can’t get out of bed. But I have a 10 am meeting, a 1 pm physical therapy appointment fifteen miles away, a 3 pm work Zoom call about a new writing project, a 6 pm master class I’m teaching, and I have to go to the gym and also play guitar for an hour and also schedule time to do my actual writing work.

Getting out of bed can be hard for me.

So I’m not going to talk about living with intentionality here because intentionality can also sometimes feel like more work—another job to compete at, to accomplish. So I’ve reduced things to this: just do something that forces you to put your phone down, and that ends the doom scrolling that, for me, resulted in the algorithm sending me short black and white films of the barracks at Auschwitz on repeat last week.

Put the phone down, just for a few minutes.

Engage in the cooking, the walking, the throwing of the slimy ball, the looking at the art, the knitting, meditating, sitting quietly.

Why.

Because doing these things amounts to sustaining ourselves. They help create a container for the generalized sorrow that so many of us are in the midst of; they enable us to move forward in the face of an ineffable grief for this idea we grew up with, that our parents and grandparents grew up with, that our great-grandparents fled to from potato famines and pogroms and a dearth of safety.

My paternal grandfather, Henry, was a nattily dressed man who wore lovely, conservative suits and a gold watch chain made of letters that spelled out his name; it disappeared when he died in 1976, and while I thought it would have gone to my father — his only son — it didn’t. When I was very little, he would sit me on his lap and tell me the story of leaving his little town across the ocean and making the trip to America on his own at age eleven.

The streets, dahlink, were paved with gold, he would tell me, explaining why he fled his homeland as a child without a nickel in his pocket or a single word of English except for banana, which he pronounced be-ne-ne to his dying day, because there were no be-ne-nes in Ukraine.

Paved vith gold, he’d repeat, pushing his wire rimmed glasses up onto the bridge of his nose.

But the thing about gold is that when it hits an all-time high, people sell. Because everything is worth money. Everything. Even the dreams of millions. Even the lives of nice young people trying to safely put their kids on a schoolbus, or go to church or their mosque or their synagogue, or a doctor’s appointment. If you dig a little, you can quantify all of it. Every bed is worth hundreds of dollars a day, there are quotas to fill, and the prices of publicly traded construction company stocks are going up.

Paved with gold.

Meanwhile, my friend Susie is at her home on Martha’s Vineyard, planning her garden. My friend Simón is at home in Colorado, batch-blending complicated spice mixes. My friend Eva had her first art opening last weekend; a lot of us had no idea she was a painter. Margaux Kent has given her son, Søren, her old Hasselblad; he bought a new strap for it. My neighbor Dan bought a red woolen hat on eBay, and my other neighbor Melissa knitted one from scratch; she’s fostering an Irish Greyhound rescued from a life of racing in a few weeks. Susan and I are finally going to see Hamnet this weekend. I’ve decided to read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe because I’ve never read it, and C.S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed is a primary source for my next book, Where You Used to Be.

There’s the Mel Brooks higher power joke about a huge guy named Phil, and the rest of his friends sitting around the cave when someone gets hit by a bolt of lightning, and they all look up and say There’s something bigger than Phil.

And so it is human nature to plod on with hope in our hearts; I believe that we are hard-wired this way, lest our species collapse. Even at our most sorrowful, we are attracted to light, like moths to flame. We move forward, with all the distractions and depressions that plague us. This is not without its speed bumps: every few days, I sit down at my desk to work and I find myself going down strange rabbit holes of distraction. I search online for old typewriter ribbons for Susan’s late Uncle George’s upright Underwood from 1923. I managed to find the heavy Toast cardigan I wanted for the season on a deep discount at Vinted, with its tags still on. I bought a Craftsman-style bookcase for my office, meant to house just my research material for my new book. I read my mother’s Uncle Nathan’s death certificate, after ordering it from the New York City archives; I didn’t even know about him until I was fifty, and my mother and pretty much everyone else insisted that he died of syphilis, but I somehow knew they were wrong, and I was right. I’ve been considering selling my little custom Larrivee parlor guitar — the one I bought in Nashville back in 2013 that has never been particularly comfortable to play. Even John Sebastian, who played it once when we fed him and his lovely wife brunch up in Woodstock — said so. If I sell it, will I invest the money I get? Or pay bills? Or turn around and buy a 1930s Martin 0-15 — an all mahogany one like Kenneth Pettingale in The Milk Carton Kids plays — which is in itself an investment that increases in value every year. Or an old Martin tenor guitar like Karine Polwart’s. No one plays tenor guitar very much anymore, and I cannot figure out why, since they can sound angelic in the right hands, of which Karine’s are two. I can finally manage to drape my right arm over the front of my guitar again after almost four months post-shoulder surgery, so I’m wanting to learn something new, the way Merlin told Arthur to do when he was very sad in The Once and Future King. Learning tenor guitar on an eighty-six year old instrument might be just the thing. Also, anything that’s lasted that long has survival secrets to tell, and I’d like to know exactly what they are.

If I were to venture a guess as to how it is the man-I-refuse-to-name got the way he did, I would point to a great, violent grief that never got sorted out; there is no joy in his house except in direct proportion to the pain of others. There is no art, no music, no animals, no affection, no peace.

I’m also considering moving my desk in front of my office window, where it originally was for the first two years we lived here; in doing so, it will face the backyard and the various bird feeders, and I’ll be able to watch a large family of deer march through our property every day looking for food (we just put out some apples for them because it’s bitterly cold, there are fawns now, there is absolutely nothing for them to eat, and that’s how we roll), and every once in a while, a family of fox, and sometimes during the summer, bear. But moving my desk in front of my window also means having my back to my office door, and there’s something that doesn’t work, Feng-shui-wise, and I’m very sensitive to Feng-shui. I have actually been known to move hotel rooms because of bad Feng-shui, and I once spent two weeks at a writer’s residency in Maine that had such great Feng-shui that I wrote more there than I have anywhere else, before or since.

If this all sounds distracted and a little disrupted, it is; how could it not be?

Rego Park, NY, 1970s

We’ve been bringing home huge boxes of things from my mother’s apartment every week, and on Tuesday we came home with a few more, along with two ancient plastic shopping bags from Alexander’s containing things my mother removed from my grandmother’s house in 1982. (Are these, then, the grand-things of the things I’m taking possession of? ) Buried on the back of a shelf in my mother’s hallway closet was my grandmother’s handbag — the one that the ambulance took when they transported her to Elmhurst Hospital on an abnormally snowy night in April 1982, while I was in my freshman year at college, four hours away. She died that night of congestive heartfailure, and I wept privately with my forehead resting on the fold-down ironing board in my dormitory utility room — quietly; gutturally — so purely terrifying was my grief over losing her. It never once occurred to me at the age of eighteen that primal grief like that is a gift that reminds us that we are human, and that visceral parts of us do manage to lie untouched by the great cosmic marketing/artificial intelligence/trend machine. Her handbag, a small satchel bought for her by my mother on the occasion of her eightieth birthday, was rimed with forty-six years of dust; on Tuesday, when I sat down at my late mother’s dining room table, I found inside it a pair of brown leather gloves that fit me perfectly, a hand-written list of my grandmother’s favorite songs, and all of her heart medications. On top of each cap was a small piece of gauze tape indicating how often to take it, written in my loopy teenage hand; I was sure I could save her if she’d just follow my directions.

It never once occurred to me at the age of eighteen that primal grief is a gift that reminds us that we are human, and that parts of us still manage to lie untouched by the great cosmic marketing/artificial intelligence/trend machine.

I thought of this yesterday — of the mundane act of grieving — and how, when it is interfered with, or prevented, or laughed at, lives are turned inside out. When this happens, who do we become? What do we become?

Recently, I discovered the extraordinary work of poet and naturalist writer Kendall Lamb, and in her essay about orcas and grief and motherhood, she relates the story of the famous orca, Tahlequah, who, in July 2018, gave birth to a calf who lived only a short time. So powerful was Tahlequah’s grief that she carried the calf’s body on her head, pushing it through the water for seventeen days and over a thousand miles; she was accompanied by members of her pod who are thought to have fed and cared for her on her journey. In 2025, Tahlequah lost another calf and repeated her journey. Tahlequah was named for Tahlequah, Washington, a town at the tip of Vashon Island in the San Juans. Tahlequah is also known, legendarily, as the Cherokee word for two is enough, which is linked to the Trail of Tears and a meeting of three elders, one of whom didn’t show up. I would like to know why not.

So many people responded to me when I shared Kendall’s essay that it was devastating, and it is. It is also breathtakingly beautiful and hopeful, and a reminder of the fact that grief and hope are two sides to the same coin.

We are a grief-centric species, and even in normal times, it comes at us from every conceivable angle. Our response to it, be it public (and shared) or private, can be distraction, or addiction (a form of distraction), or disbelief, or the making of art. Unmetabolized, it has made people I know well unspeakably cruel, and if I were to venture a guess as to how it is the orange man-I-refuse-to-name got the way he did, I would point to a great, violent grief that never got sorted out; there is no joy in his house except at the expense of the pain of others. There is no art, no music, no animals, no apparent peace, no affection.

I suspect that there are more of us here in this place of sorrow, than not: getting older, raising children, caring for elderly parents or ill partners, caring for the planet, caring for our neighbors, trying to stay healthy, going down safe digital rabbit holes of distraction (the typewriter ribbons; my great-uncle’s death certificate; wanting to learn something new). However we deal with it, though, it seems to be connected directly to the human instinct to sustain itself. I have written here that sustenance feeds us, body and soul, especially at moments of profound, systemic, national grief the likes of which many of us are experiencing for the first time in our lives.

I no longer look at sorrow as something to be terrified of and avoided, the way I once did. Instead, I am trying to step into it, not to let it overtake my life but to allow it to become a part of who I am and how I move through the world. I’ve come to a place where I understand that sorrow and sustenance are kin, and I cannot possibly have one without also having the other.

Surrounded by my mother’s things, and the news, and worries about the health of people I love, I’m trying to remember this, at least for today.

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Elissa Altman on art, sustenance, and grief

the distraction of grief.

How Grief Made Us More Creative Than Ever

grief and ruins and small miracles*

he would have liked my house.

is cruelty addictive?